Alexis Chema

I am a scholar of Romantic literature and culture, with particular interest in poetry, visual art, and the civic functions they have been engaged to serve. 

The book I am writing, Roads of Excess: Poetry and Public Address in the Age of Revolutions, is about changes to the public sphere over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the impacts these changes had on poetry—who wrote and read it, how it circulated, and, most of all, on how matters of language and style adapt to the perceived conditions of mass reading. What poetic theories and practices arose in an effort to reach, be understood by, and persuade an audience that was distinguished, in the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by its “promiscuousness”? My study proposes that, alongside the well-known responses to mass readership—Wordsworth’s aversion to “poetical diction,” Coleridge’s efforts to define his ideal readership—there runs the antithetical approach of the Bluestockings, Della Cruscans, Cockneys, Poetesses, and others who agreed that poetry, even (and especially) at its most “poetic,” possessed a special capacity to generate common ground. Although their investments in ornament have led these traditions to be dismissed as “feminine,” they forwarded one of the period’s most theoretically innovative responses to mass readership, based on the shared apprehension that the powerful mystifications of style could help them communicate and persuade effectively in the medium of print.

My other ongoing book project is a study of miscellaneousness as an aesthetic and organizing principle in popular bibliographic formats (commonplace books, almanacs, albums, annuals, periodicals). It argues that the growing prominence of the miscellany in the late eighteenth century lays the groundwork for the rise of a modern—that is, phenomenologically-oriented—genre theory. Distinguished by a resistance to classifying principles, the miscellany provided a way of thinking of genre on the whole as a shifting field of interpretation, and not a rigid taxonomic structure. 

My courses are regularly cross-listed with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and in addition to teaching about literature, I have enjoyed designing courses that relate constructions of gender to aspects of everyday life, like childhood, food practices, walking, emotion, illness, and, of course, reading and writing.

• The Manuscript Book in the Long Eighteenth Century. Special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life. Co-editor, with Betty Schellenberg. (48.1) January 2024.
• “Diction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Poem, ed. Sean Pryor. Cambridge University Press. Summer 2024.
• “Review of The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication by Yohei Igarashi.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 53:3 (December 2020): 259-64.
• “Punning in Pure English.” Forum on poetics, “Poetic Language & the Outside.” Tupelo Quarterly (March 2020). 
• “‘A Tongue in Every Star’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Poetics of Influence.” Essays in Romanticism 23.2 (2016): 193-210.

2021-2022 Courses:

• The Pleasure of Hating: Satire Now and Then (graduate)
• Poetry in the Land of Childhood (undergraduate)
• Greece & Rome: Texts, Traditions, Transformations

Graduate:

• Bad Readers
• The Print Revolution & New Readers: Women, Workers, Children

Undergraduate:

• Romantic Poetry and the World
• Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley
• Frankenstein’s Hideous Progeny
• Experiments in Epic Poetry
• Romantic Endangerment
• Gender & the Circulation of Texts